Beneath a Burning Sky (The Dawnhawk Trilogy Book 3) (33 page)

“Aye,” said Fengel. He tried not to think too much about Natasha. “It’s about the only chance we’ve got left at this point.”

“We need to hurry, then. A squad of soldiers followed us down here. I’ve done what I could to jury-rig the doors behind us, but someone broke the locks.”

Imogen glared witheringly at Fengel. “You said—”

He coughed loudly. “Yes, speed is essential. Only there’s this last door in the way. Do you have the key?”

“Of course,” replied Barlett. “Every full Brother has one.” He fished a complicated skeleton key from one of his innumerable pockets and suddenly doubled over with his free hand to his wounded side. Molly Mayhap ran over to support him, quiet as always, one hand tightly clutching her knife.

Fengel took the key from his outstretched hand. “Here, fellow. I’ve got it.”

“You can’t just jam it in,” hissed the Brother in pain. “Press this in slowly, only about—”

“Three-quarters of the way, then a quarter-turn to the right, followed by a seven degree reverse rotation. Yes, I’ve got it down by now.”

Barlett looked up oddly at him. “You didn’t try
picking
the locks, did you?” he groaned. “Imogen, you know how sensitive they are!”

“We didn’t have any other choice!”

Fengel let them argue and turned to the door. He carefully inserted the key in the proscribed method, working the tumblers and shifting them around until a great click sounded somewhere within the armored lock. Brother Barlett wasn’t joking. Even with the key, this was still tricky.

So much faster this way.
Having the key was always best, though a part of him did want to go back to work with the wires and the screwdriver. It was good to keep such skills polished—one never quite knew when one would need to tease a lock.
Maybe some other time.
Fengel grabbed the handle with both hands and twisted it, hauling back and slowly opening the armored portal to their destination.

The others quit arguing and joined him. Imogen shone her galvanic torch into the darkened vault, revealing another chamber just as large as the one they stood in. Most of the floor was gone, tumbling away into a dark pit filled with bundles of brass pipe rising up to fill it like the branches of some overgrown bush. Directly ahead, diamond-plate steel steps led down a wide platform. It hung out over the pit, supporting arcane panels of wood and glass from which the Mechanists could do their work. A faint odor filled the space, more than just stale air. Fengel recognized the flammable stink of light-air gas.

“There,” said Fengel. “Imogen, do you know what to do?”

“Of course,” she replied. The Mechanist-Aspirant pushed past him and tromped down the stairs.

Fengel stepped aside and let Barlett stagger past. The Mechanist stood a little straighter and moved on his own, leaving Molly behind. He clutched his side still, though, and his breath was ragged behind the mask. “Don’t forget that you’re still just an
aspirant
, Imogen. Observe the protocols. This isn’t something that can be rushed.”

“Of course I’ll observe the protocols. I’ve studied this system since I was little!”

“Well, I helped build the Goddess-damned thing, so you’ll listen and listen well.”

Fengel let them argue. He glanced at Molly, who stood just inside the door with him, then cocked his head after the Mechanists with a smile. She shrugged, returning a smile of her own.

“Is that blood I see on your stiletto, Molly dear? Stab yourself a soldier, did you?”

The little girl nodded enthusiastically in the gloom.

“That’s a good girl. Well, let’s go on down, and you can tell me all about it.”

A clatter and a curse from the chamber behind them stopped him cold. Fengel whirled and drew his saber. The machinery ratcheted and whirred as usual, but past the big wall of turning gears, he spied a splash of light. Not cold and constant like Imogen’s torch, but the flickering yellow of an oil lantern. Barlett’s pursuers had caught up to them.

Three men stepped out from behind the gears. The one in the lead held the lantern, while the other two raised pistols and smallswords. They wore the blue jackets and round black caps of the marines and moved cautiously, staring at the room about them like it would come to life at any moment and devour them.

Bluecoats. Damnation.
Apparently Barlett hadn’t secured the doors as well as he’d thought.

Fengel quickly moved to the right, behind one side of the doorway. “Molly girl,” he whispered. “Get down there to the platform.” She shook her head and he sighed. “I can take three Bluecoats, but I need you down there in case one gets past, all right?”

The little girl glared at him with narrow eyes, then nodded slowly. She turned and ran, her shoes clattering on the metal stairs.

Yellow lantern light flashed up after her. “There!” cried one of the marines. “It’s the girl!”

“Pistols up!” ordered the sergeant at their head. “Don’t let ’er close!”

A shaft of lantern light flashed past Fengel for the stair and the platform below it. Barlett and Imogen turned in surprise, while Molly dove behind a heavy pipe. “The Bluecoats!” cried Barlett. “Captain Fengel, you can’t let them fire in here!”

Two stubby pistol noses poked through the doorway as the light behind them brightened. Fengel rolled away from the wall and lashed out at the nearest soldier, aiming carefully. The blade bit, cutting away the pistol and the hand holding it at the wrist. Blood spurted from the stump, and the Bluecoat froze in shock and pain. Fengel didn’t wait for his reaction. He pushed past, ramming the bell guard of his blade into the face of the other soldier, feeling the crunch of breaking teeth through his weapon.

Faster, faster
. The soldier dropped his pistol and fell back with the start of a muffled scream, the twin to the hoarse shriek just erupting from Fengel’s first victim. He pushed between the two Bluecoats, aiming a backswing hack at the head of the third and final soldier, the one holding the lamp.

The man was too quick, though, too wary. At Fengel’s appearance, he’d already started falling back with his smallsword raised in a block. It was enough, barely. Fengel’s blade rang off the hasty guard, forcing the man to retreat even farther with a curse.

“Hurry up down there!” Fengel yelled back over his shoulder.

“I’m trying!” shouted Imogen.

“Follow the damnable protocols!” ordered Barlett, his voice like a leaking balloon.

The two soldiers collapsed behind Fengel, one shrieking and clutching at his severed hand, the other off-balance and flailing. Fengel drove ahead with an experimental slash at the third man. He blocked the blow with confidence, neither overeager nor unskilled, and gave enough ground that Fengel had to step out away from the cover of the door and into the vaulted space before it.

The man set the lantern down and moved aside, watching Fengel warily the whole time. By the chevrons on his sleeve, he was a sergeant and, given the battered nature of his face and the men he’d sent forward as bait, an experienced one.

“That was cowardly of ya,” said the sergeant. “But well done.”

“The wrist is especially vulnerable to a sharp blade,” replied Fengel. He eyed the distance between them and the angle of the lighting. “A dagger can sever tendons and arteries. While a sword...” He raised his own up into guard. “A sword can do so much worse.”

They circled. Out of the corner of his eye, Fengel saw the machinery all about them in a new light. The massive gears could catch and grind. Chain linkages could twist and trip. He had to be wary.

The sergeant hefted his blade. His dry, scarred lips were pursed in calculation, and his eyes narrow above an oft-broken nose.

Something about that face gave Fengel pause.
Do I know him? He seems...familiar.

The sergeant jerked back in surprise. His eyes widened, and then a crazy, cruel grin stretched itself across his features.

“Ashley Fengel,” breathed the man.

A galvanic shock shot straight through Fengel. It traveled from his boots to his brain and left white-hot rage in its wake. “I don’t know how you know my name,” he hissed, “but you will not die cleanly for using it.”

His opponent gave a deep belly laugh. “By the Goddess Above. Little Ashley Fengel. Here, of all places! Now, ain’t that just something.”

“I would have your name before I kill you,” snarled Fengel. “Have we met somewhere, sir?”

The Bluecoat sergeant touched his chest with his free hand, mockingly shocked. “You dunno me, Ashley? After all the fun we had back in Darrenway? All the running you did from me an’ my Coal Street Boys?”

Fengel stilled. He felt his jaw drop open. Memories long forgotten washed over him: Filthy alleys and firetrap tenements. Helping Da with his prad-rolling, trying to stay a step ahead of the aristocrats. Getting flattened every single day by the Coal Street Boys, until he learned to fight back against them and their leader: big, mean Jacob Lanters.

“Jacob,” he breathed. “How? How can you, of all people, be here now?”

“How else?” said the sergeant. He started circling again, forcing Fengel to keep up. “Last time we met, you cheated yer little arse off—hit me with a damned cat and knocked me out cold. I lost control o’ the old gang. You had ’em then. After that, all I had left was going home to be beaten by my drunkard pa every night. So I nicked every penny he had on ’im and ran off to join the navy.” He smiled. “Now I serve Admiral Wintermourn ’imself. Adjutant with command of a whole company of marines! And you’re just a damned traitor and pirate. I’m gonna take my time killing you, you little shit.”

Fengel recovered. He brought his saber back up in guard. “I never dropped a cat on you, Jacob. If you hadn’t been torturing the thing, it wouldn’t have attacked. But that’s beside the point. You wouldn’t have won that day, and you’re not going to win now.” He smiled a grim smile of his own, relishing the moment. “I’m going to kill you, Jacob Lanters. For everything you did to me back then, everything you’ve done today, and all the things in between that I’m so sure you richly deserve.”

He lunged, aiming the tip of his blade square for the heart of his onetime nemesis. Jacob’s eyes widened at his speed. The sergeant just barely parried his blow, sending Fengel’s blade skidding up to tear across his right breast before continuing on up past his shoulder.

A more skilled swordsman would have taken advantage of Fengel’s overextension. Lanters only cursed in pain and clutched at the cut with his free hand. He fell back, giving Fengel all the time he needed to recover.

Fengel raised his blade back into guard. “Remember, Jacob? I found a sword to fend you off with, an old arming blade.” He feinted, slipping his saber up past the sergeant’s guard to slash his thigh. “Watched the guards as they practiced, to learn how to use it.” He beat Lanters’s blade aside, pushing past to nick the upper arm. “I’ve come a long way since then. Fighting for my life, first in the navy, then for myself.
Years
spent practicing, with my life on the line every time.” He casually parried a slash at his head. “I’m sure that you’re capable in a brawl, but here and now, that’s not going to save you.”

The sergeant backed up with a curse to a set of man-sized pumping pistons. He was a bulky shadow now in the dim light shed by the lantern at their feet—his sergeant’s uniform was soaked with blood.

Somewhere in the chamber overhead a thunderous hissing began. Someone shouted in triumph. Imogen, likely. She’d managed to get the light-air gas pumping.

Fengel returned his attention to his victim.
Time to make an end of this
.

Jacob Lanters met his eyes and gave a shallow nod. He hawked and spat phlegm. “Oh aye,” he said, glancing aside. “I’m no fencer. Then again, I don’t need ta be.”

A flash and a thunderclap erupted from the doorway, where the Bluecoat who still had both hands had recovered enough to fire a musket. The ball whipped just past Fengel’s cheek, impacted against a piston, and ricocheted back. It caught Fengel’s hat, taking it off and away. He turned to take in the new threat, raising his saber to ward off Lanters from any desperate action.

The Bluecoat sergeant barreled forward with his smallsword upraised above his head. He swung down in a two-handed chop that knocked Fengel’s sword aside. Fengel automatically turned it into a binding disarm, but Lanters let go, lifting up one hoary fist to catch Fengel squarely across the jaw.

Stars bloomed across Fengel’s vision, and he felt his monocle fly free to dangle on its chain. He brought his free hand up to block, but Lanters caught it with his own and hauled it out of the way. The sergeant hit him again with another tooth-loosening blow, knocking him down and back off balance. Fengel fell to his knees while the other man held him half-up and pummeled away. He couldn’t think, couldn’t react, couldn’t do anything but try to get away.

“Now this...is more like it,” roared Jacob Lanters. “Just like old times...eh,
Ashley?
”

The sergeant paused for breath and reared back with one bloody-knuckled fist. Fengel only stared at him, trying to focus through the pain, trying to react.

Something fell out from the dark up above. It landed squarely on the burly sergeant’s head, a hissing and spitting ball of furious orange fur, like some daemon out of the dark.

Jacob Lanters let go of Fengel instantly, both hands going for Cubbins where he bit and scratched. The sergeant screamed, high and hoarse, and beat at the furious feline.

Fengel felt the strangest thing, not unlike nostalgia, or deja vu. Then he looked down at the saber he still gripped. Amazingly, his reflexes had kept him from letting go. He grit his teeth, lifted the tip of his blade, and thrust up. The blade entered Lanters’s belly and slid up past his ribs to his heart.

Sergeant Lanters choked, then went strangely still. He batted weakly at Cubbins, his other hand now seeking gingerly for the length of steel buried in his guts. Then he collapsed forward onto Fengel as his fat orange savior leaped off the corpse with a final hiss.

Blood from the sergeant’s ruined face poured onto Fengel’s, and the man’s limbs twitched reflexively. Fengel cursed, struggled, and finally rolled the dying body aside. He sat up, soaked in the gore of the man, to look at the other Bluecoats near the door. One of them should be just about to fall upon him.